Elgu looked at his new student and started the first lecture. "The first, and most important rule of doing an autopsy is having gloves and a mask. Believe me not only it is outrageously disgusting when some blood splatters into your mouth, but it is also dangerous. You never know if a corpse you are operating on doesn't carry some terrible disease, or its blood is simply poisonous." A grimace appeared on the teacher's face as if he experienced the horror himself.
"Oh, do you have spares? I didn't bring any with me."
Luckily, Elgu was prepared. He gave Adam a quick scrutinizing look, before turning around to reach for the supplies.
"It's not necessary, but you may also get out of that pretty robe, it would be a shame if it was dirtied. Thou, I am curious how would that blue look after giving it a little contrast."
Adam looked down, on the robe he was so proud of, its arctic blue colour would definitely make blood visible, not that he wanted any of the red fluid on it. "Yeah." He said.
If a flash, Adam stood only in his pants and a shirt, a cloth mask on his face and leather gloves on his hands.
"Let's start." Aspiring gut-cutter said.
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Elgu started to cut into a rabbit that layed on the table. Firstly, he cut its belly open and took its guts out making slow, experienced cuts in places where they connect. Then, he took out the heart, lungs and liver. All the while asking Adam various questions, on topics regarding bodies of beasts and animals, humans also.
Adam knew a surprisingly big part of the answers, the product of his not-so-long study in the library.
When he didn't know something, Elgu stopped to explain to him, why is that the case and what is the case, showing him the whole way of thinking that led the best of doctors and researchers to conclude the answer as it is.
When the gutting of the rabbit's torso was completed, they made their way to its head.
"The rabbit's head is small, which will help you to learn how to be precise. You should treat it as a general practice, as while handling the brain is a great ability, that's not something that I will teach you. In my profession, I extract the brain only if I am ordered to, because if I am asked to operate or try to deal with an injury to the head, the patient can be considered dead either way. And if they need to identify the cause of death, I don't need to be that careful around the brain." Elgu talked while cutting into the skull with careful saw cuts.
Elgu was mainly a pathologist, but he also worked as a surgeon, getting things out of people, or sometimes even helping priests and healers while treating wounds or ailments hidden deep in the body, when they needed to inject their energy as near as possible.
After getting everything he could out of the rabbit, he started to sew it back together outside of the body. "That's one of the techniques used while studying the structure of organs in the unfamiliar creature, You can also skin it and get the bones out first, but the first method is less risky in terms of destrouting the organs. My teacher always said that if I found a new being worthy of study, the first one was the way to go, then I could see how the bones worked, never in the opposite order." He had done the second technique next, and as he said, the organs were more damaged than with the first.
While he was very experienced with cutting and sewing the flesh, breaking the bones off and taking them out without damaging organs was not something he had done often.
After completing the work on the rabbit, Elgu told Adam to dissect one himself.
This time, the work was only accompanied by Elgu's thoughts and hints. He walked Adam through the process, telling him what and when to do. But even with an experienced surgeon telling him what to do step by step, Adam still messed up a lot of cuts, not even mentioning sewing. It was nothing like sewing normal cloth, not only did piercing the skin require more strength, but sometimes when he made the hole near the edge, the skin tore apart under the stress.
And that continued to the end of the lesson. After a few first attempts, Adam started to damage the tissue less. When his teacher noticed that, he started to ask him questions again. Firstly the basic ones, for which Adam knew the answers most of the time.
Near the end of the session though, the questions grew harder and harder, Adam still had an answer for most of them, thanks to his great memory, but the number of questions to which he knew only a partial answer or didn't know any at all grew rapidly.
Their session ended along with the rise of the moon. Elgu went home, and Adam to the dining room.
He ate very fast, barely speaking to anybody there, he still had to go to his uncle's apartment and snuggle some kitties before going to sleep, and it was already late.
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This week was a little different from the two before it. The wall stopping Adam's progress for the last two weeks disappeared, and with it, Adams's curiosity and ambition grew anew.
The young mage had his schedule stretched to the brim, with carefully planned breaks to eat and learning sessions after and before patrols. Before patrols, Adam read the books in the Tower's library, not blindly for the first time. He took Elgu to show him which books were worth reading and recommended the sequence in which his temporary pupil should read them, not to get something too advanced for the time.
After the patrols and eating lunch, he practised with Elgu in the laboratory. They changed the type of corpses every second day. Which was really fast, for comparison, if it was a serious apprenticeship not a crash course, Elgu wouldn't allow a change for at least a week or two.
Adam's wallet thinned considerably through this week. From the 45 gold coins he loaned, 40 were used to acquire the corpses, and another four went to Elgu's pocket, only 1 gold coin remained beside Adam.
That is if he didn't go to the vet. But he did, and barely anything remained of his money.
Fortunately, he didn't plan to learn how to gut for more than a week. If he did, another loan would be needed, or he would have to wait for his pay to arrive from the army.
On a different note, with the variety of flesh Adam cut into, he started to feel as if he was taking lessons from a butcher, not a surgeon.
About butchers, Elgu also told Adam how to determine if you can eat parts of monsters.
"You just have to cut it out, preferably boil or roast it. Then give it to the most undesirable member of your team. If he dies, it's not something you should eat." Morbidly serious pathologist presented his similarly dark humour.
"What if I choose a girl? Do I try again with a boy?" Adam seriously replied, curiously glancing at his teacher.
"Yes." An Answer reverberated throughout the silent room.
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At the end of the third week of building leg muscles, by walking around the city. And the start of March, Watt was finally released from care under the healers.
His injuries closed, his body healthy, and his spirit ready for an adventure, or a mission to be exact.